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Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Early American Studies)

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Zagarri answers a question that has long puzzled me: Where did the cult of true womanhood come from? Why did Americans of the Jacksonian Era believe they needed to box women in so narrowly? Zagarri argues that the cult of true womanhood represented a backlash against the activities of "female politicians" during and immediately after the American Revolution. She argues persuasively that cultural observers were unnerved by women's open partisanship and spirited engagement with political news and that, as the United States settled into "the new republican order" (134), women were channeled away from partisan activity into attitudes and behaviors that would cultivate political tolerance and social cohesion. Women retained a political role, but after 1820 it was an explicitly non-partisan one.

Zagarri breaks new ground in defining the category of "female politicians," women who did not hold elected office but who followed politics eagerly, developing and expressing political opinions of their own (chapter 2). Many of the activities that Zagarri cites seem symbolic at best: women baked "election cakes" for election day, wore partisan rosettes to church, baited suitors who did not share their political views, and so forth. Others seem inevitable: women who managed farms and businesses for husbands absent on political business certainly contributed to the public good, but did they have any choice in the matter? But though many forms of women's political engagement seem rather modest in their impact, Zagarri amply documents women's interest in politics in the era 1760-1820 and also demonstrates that American men took women's political engagement seriously. This is the best explanation I've ever seen of what might have inspired the backlash against women's political engagement in the Jacksonian era and for much of the nineteenth century.

Essential reading for anyone interested in women in the Revolutionary or nineteenth-century United States.